Rape in the South Pacific

It is fascinating how little rape means when it happens to a non-Anglo Saxon.

The girl Polanski seduced, and anally penetrated, has absorbed the West, and most of its media, for thirty-nine years. Little girls to whom this happened on Nauru are already forgotten — unnamed, unmourned.

Racism of this kind continues in this Liberal cabinet. They regard the buggering of children as an administrative malfunction, not a crime. No rapist on their watch, no child abuser, no trader in blow-jobs, no threatener of witnesses, on Manus or Nauru will go to gaol, will ever go to gaol. Not on their watch; never. Nor will the twelve murderers of Reza Barati. These are black people, or dusky heathens, and they do not deserve the caress of justice, nor even, like the raped women in Redfern Now, the hope of it.

They boast of the children being "no longer in detention". And they are no longer in detention. Hundreds of them are no longer in detention. But where are they? On Nauru, an island the size of Marrickville, in easy reach of their abusers, who will kill them if they complain of further assaults to the listless, corrupt constabulary and assault them unpunished again.

And they will be there for 90 years. They will not be allowed to go offshore to a university, or marry – offshore – a man of their own faith and live with him. They have been kidnapped, imprisoned, tormented, raped, corrupted, deprived of an education and most human opportunity, and this is called being "put at liberty", or "released from detention" by these coarse dim tyrants in the Abbott government. To whom rape is a mere administrative detail, to be sorted out by new arrangements.

Australian Government seeks immunity (including contractors) over use of force in immigration detention | Guardian - http://t.co/j3S3kdekW6

It is likely, though not certain, that Morrison will be charged with child abuse after Queensland, Victoria, the ACT and South Australia and a joint Royal Commission find he failed to report major crimes to the authorities for a year or more after he heard of them; and Dutton too if he does not speak up soon.

But until then, the racism continues, and the Great Forgetting, and the obscene neglect of injured children, and the disregard of heinous crime which has become the hallmark of this government — who, like Pinochet, would prefer those crime victims "disappear".